SAP

The AI assistant market is projected to grow from $3.35 billion this year to $21.11 billion by 2030, according to Indian research firm MarketsandMarkets.

This represents a compound annual growth rate of 44.5 percent, with North America forecast to have the largest share during that five year period.

Many enterprises rely on some sort of ERP application for their business operations and decision making. The vast majority of large organizations use ERP applications from leading vendors like SAP and Oracle.

New research from threat data and intelligence leader Flashpoint and ERP cybersecurity and compliance leader Onapsis reveals evidence that SAP business-critical applications are increasingly in the sights of and valuable for cybercriminals.

Industry giant IBM is today announcing a collaboration with ERP specialist SAP to develop solutions to help clients in the consumer packaged goods and retail industries enhance their supply chain, finance operations, sales and services using generative AI.

This involves embedding IBM's watsonx enterprise-ready AI and data platform and AI assistants, into SAP solutions to create new generative and traditional AI solutions focused on addressing the complexities of the direct store delivery business process and product portfolio management.

Businesses today face a wider and more dangerous array of cybersecurity threats than ever before. In the UK alone there were more than 400,000 reports of fraud and cybercrime in 2021. Those crimes come with significant costs too. In addition to the reputational damage that comes with cybersecurity incidents, data breaches cost UK companies an average of US$4.35 million.

That makes it critical that organizations have the best possible cyber defences in place, not just for the threats they face today but also for those of tomorrow. This is especially true for business-critical applications like ERP systems that need to be run continuously in order for the organization to keep operating smoothly and servicing its customers.

Some trends come quickly and disappear from the scene. For example, artificial intelligence was going to be the savior of cybersecurity, but this trend has turned out to be a smokescreen.

Here are five SAP application security trends that are here to stay.

According to a new poll 40 percent of enterprises don't include business-critical systems such as SAP in their cybersecurity monitoring. In addition, a further 27 percent are unsure if systems are included in their cybersecurity monitoring at all.

The survey from Logpoint also shows only 23 percent say the process of reviewing SAP logs for cybersecurity events or cyberthreat activity is automated through SIEM, with almost 19 percent still doing so manually.

SAP remains one of the most commonly used enterprise resource planning tools and many businesses are looking to migrate their SAP to the cloud from on-premise systems. But this is being held back by a shortage of skills.

New research from Ensono shows just four percent of UK IT leaders say they have completed their SAP to public cloud migration strategy. 80 percent of those who haven't completed projects say they have postponed or canceled their migration of SAP applications to the public cloud due to the SAP skills shortage and 74 percent have taken a similar decision due to a lack of public cloud skills.

Research released today from managed services provider Ensono reveals that 79 percent of UK IT leaders plan to migrate their SAP applications to the public cloud within the next two years.

While the majority of SAP applications are still housed on-premise, 70 percent of those responsible for SAP believe migrating to the public cloud will be more beneficial than keeping it in-house. In fact, 61 percent state that migrating SAP to public cloud is critical for their business success.